


The poem I don't say, the one I don't deserve.

by MarauderCracker



Category: Glee
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-13 14:57:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2154816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/pseuds/MarauderCracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Kurt had to choose a favorite poet, it would be Pablo Neruda. Well, maybe William Shakespeare, and it’s also a close tie with Sylvia Plath. He likes romance, words that fall in the rhyme with ease, poems that can be sung without effort. Sebastian likes Charles Bukowski.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The poem I don't say, the one I don't deserve.

If Kurt had to choose a favorite poet, it would be Pablo Neruda. Well, maybe William Shakespeare, and it’s also a close tie with Sylvia Plath. He likes romance, words that fall in the rhyme with ease, poems that can be sung without effort.   
They reconcile after a silly fight and Kurt mock-gifts Neruda’s 15th poem to Sebastian. The poem is printed in a light blue sheet, and there’s two lines underlined:

“ _I like you when you are quiet  
because it is as though you are absent,_  
 _and you hear me from far away,_  
and my voice does not touch you.”

Glee club taught him to talk in songs and, after infinite hours of reciting Shakespeare in NYADA, he got used to quoting random things within a conversation, using others’ words as if they were his. The first time Sebastian says “I love you,” Kurt mutters “sometimes I think I made you up inside my head.”  
They don’t start dating after almost two years of sleeping together. Two entire years in which Kurt never says I love you, but smiles when Sebastian says it and kisses him long and tender and slips poems in the pockets of his jeans, knowing that Sebastian will find them the next day.  
One day, he lets another poem (Neruda, again, because Shakespeare seems like saying too much, like giving too much; so he chooses Pablo Neruda and really hopes this makes up for all the unspoken I love you’s and all the shit they went trough in these years), he chooses a poem that sums up all of his feelings and lets it tapped to the screen of Sebastian’s laptot.

“ _I do not love you except because I love you;_  
 _I go from loving to not loving you,_  
 _From waiting to not waiting for you_  
 _My heart moves from cold to fire._

_I love you only because it’s you the one I love;_  
 _I hate you deeply, and hating you_  
 _Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you_  
 _Is that I do not see you but love you blindly._ ”

Sebastian finds it when he arrives to his apartment. They don’t live together but Kurt spends most of his time at Sebastian’s place, only going back to his after two or three days. He finds it weird that Kurt isn’t napping in the couch, or sitting in the countertop at the kitchen while waiting for his coffee to be ready, or waiting for him in the bed (always reading a book and probably already naked). When Sebastian opens his laptop, he only needs to read the poem to know why Kurt isn’t there.  
(When Kurt opens the door of his apartment, Sebastian doesn’t wait a second before tugging him closer by the collar of his shirt and kissing him until they can’t breathe and Kurt pushes away a little. Just enough to lean his forehead against Sebastian’s and smile when he whispers “would you stop being an idiot and be my boyfriend already?”)

Sebastian likes Charles Bukowski. Kurt says that he couldn’t have expected any less. But Sebastian doesn’t like him only because of the tangle of alcohol and the sex that wrap all his poems, and not because liking an abstract poet is more dignified than liking Emily Dickinson.  
Yes, Sebastian says that he’s against all of that romantic bullshit. He always mocks Kurt for his passion for Shakespeare and threatens that “if you start liking Bécquer I will dump you,” but saves Cummings’ “ _I like my body when it is with your body_ ” in his wallet, the frail sheet tucked in eight and hidden between his credit cards. (One day, Kurt finds it and asks if it’s the one he gave him for their first month in a real relationship. Sebastian denies it for weeks.)  
But yes, Sebastian’s favorite is Bukowski. Right after they start dating for real, Sebastian writes a few bits of “ _She says_ ” in a post it and sticks it to the coffee maker. That doesn’t stop Kurt from complaining about Sebastian always forgetting to clean the filter.  
They break up six months after that. Sebastian’s mother is sick and he goes to Paris, planning on living with her until she gets better. Sebastian says that he really can’t do the whole “long distance relationship crap” and Kurt is hurt and doesn’t go to the airport to say goodbye.  
Sebastian’s mother doesn’t get better. Kurt gets over the heartache and flies over the Atlantic to find a Sebastian that is utterly devastated, a Sebastian that is too high and drunk to form a proper sentence but can stumble across the room to pick up a book, go through the pages and recognize the one he’s looking for even though he can’t even focus his gaze in the letters.  

“ _I don’t know how many bottles of beer_  
 _I have consumed while waiting for things_  
 _to get better_  
 _I dont know how much wine and whisky_  
 _and beer_  
 _mostly beer_  
 _I have consumed after_  
 _splits with women-_  
 _waiting for the phone to ring_  
 _waiting for the sound of footsteps,_  
 _and the phone to ring_  
 _waiting for the sounds of footsteps,_  
 _and the phone never rings_  
 _until much later_  
 _and the footsteps never arrive_  
 _until much later_  
 _when my stomach is coming up out of my mouth_  
 _they arrive as fresh as spring flowers:_  
 _‘what the hell have you done to yourself?_  
 _it will be 3 days before you can fuck me!’_ ”

Kurt hugs Sebastian tightly and holds his hand when Margaux finally passes away and helps him choose a poem to put in her grave. They go through her books together, Sebastian leaving aside the ones he wants to take back with him, until Kurt finds the perfect verse. It’s by an Italian writer, Alda Merini, and the translation doesn’t sound quite as beautiful in English as it does in Italian, but the meaning is the same.

“ _But there’s a cry you left_  
 _in my heart._  
 _And has not ever happened_  
 _through the time_  
 _that an angel like you_  
 _had not taken the wings of the poet_  
 _and had not led them to Paradise._ ”

They both and a lot of Maragux’s books go back to New York. The rest stays in the loft in Paris, which Sebastian sells in less than two days. Kurtbastian tries to argue this decision, but Sebastian won’t listen. Paris has broken his heart too many times already, he doesn’t want more connections with it.  
Sebastian had a poem inked when he turned eighteen, just after moving to New York. It’s in the inner side of his left upper arm, written in a handwriting that stretches long to the right and tightens around the edges. It’s in French, a quote from Paul Verlaine. “ _Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà, de ta jeunesse?_ ” (“What have you done of your youth, Sebastian?” people used to ask him. His youth is in Paris, in that lock he left in the bridge of Pont de l’Archevêché, in Margaux’s grave. His youth and a broken heart and a relationship with his mother he won’t have a chance to fix are in Paris, and Sebastian doesn’t want to go back.)  
He gets another tattoo, a while after Kurt and him start dating again. He never tells Kurt the real meaning, he never tells Kurt “it’s for you, it’s because of you,” but he’s sure that Kurt knows it. In the left side of his ribs, where he can feel his heart the louder.

“ _From the war of the words hide me,_  
 _and shut down the heat of my elemental body._ ”

Kurt likes Walt Whitman when it comes from Sebastian. He was born to lie in bed, wearing only his glasses and reading the “ _Song of myself_ ”, pronouncing every word like a claim. Kurt half jokes that only someone as narcissistic could read that book with such emotion, but smiles when Sebastian recites that

“ _I celebrate myself, and sing myself,_  
and what I assume you shall assume,  
for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

He learns to love Withman, though, when he’s alone. If Sebastian is not looking, he grabs Sebastian’s copy of “ _Leaves of Grass_ ” and makes sure to put it back in place so his boyfriend never knows that he actually likes those poems.  
They are meant for each other, but then no. They are happy together, but then no. Kurt is offered a work in Paris. Sebastian can’t go back there, Kurt can’t reject the chance. He cries and packs his books and when he finds Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems he cries harder. Because Sebastian got inked one of her phrases only for him, even if he doesn’t tell. Because Kurt isn’t sure he knows how to live without him anymore.

“ _and what if I flipped a coin? (heads you tails the sky)_  
no! your self can’t take the risk and  
I want you I want-you!”

Kurt doesn’t flip the coin because he has never resigned his dreams for anyone and he won’t start now. He leaves a lot of things in the apartment, a book forgotten in between of Sebastian’s papers and his favorite jacket tucked under the bed and a sheet in one of its pockets. A poem handwritten and a bit blurred where the tears fell, a poem Sebastian doesn’t find until much later.  
And they hug in the airport and they kiss a last time and Sebastian completely massacres one of Shakespeare’s poems, whispering it in Kurt’s ear. “ _Take all my loves, my love, take them all; what do you have then more than you had before?_ ” It hurts to say goodbye.  
Ten months, ten entire months pass by and Sebastian isn’t over it. All the songs and all the poems ache and somewhere around the sixth month he buys from Girondo, only to tear off the pages after reading it. He sends a text to Kurt, the first one in weeks, with a poem.

“ _For ye see_  
with no moss,   
my heart of tinder,   
what did we do,   
what have we done   
with our poor hands,   
with our skeletons of winter and summer.”

He drowns a bottle of whiskey in less than an hour and goes back to reading poems by Bukowski, particularly that one, the one called “ _To the whore who stole my poems_ ”.  
The tenth month is the middle of winter and he finds the jacket under the bed, the jacket and a lot of trash but mostly the jacket and it still smells faintly like Kurt in the collar. He puts it on and lies in the bed, lights up a cigarette and saves the lighter in the jacket’s pocket out of instinct. He’s thinking about Kurt bitching at him for going back to smoking and leaving the stink of smoke in his jacket, when the pads of his fingers brush against something. Sebastian unfolds the sheet, sees Kurt’s neat handwriting, stares at the poem until the tears blur his vision.  
(Kurt is not expecting Sebastian at the door of his apartment, Sebastian with Kurt’s jacket on, Sebastian with cigarette hanging from his lips and the bloodshot eyes of someone that hasn’t slept in eternities. Kurt is not expecting the crumpled sheet in Sebastian’s hands, the kiss that takes away all the air from his lungs, the murmur of a poem against his lips. “ _If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles_ ,” and a kiss like a promise.)  
They put a lock with their names in the bridge of Pont de l’Archevêché, they live half in New York and half in Paris, Sebastian ends up finding a job in France. They buy an apartment where all of their books fit and fill one of the walls of their room with poems and Sebastian’s heart feel like it’s never been broken. He goes to visit her mother’s grave sometimes and they never think of adopting a child or anything alike. Kurt reminds Sebastian that “ _there was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now, and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now_ ,” now that he can admit that he likes Walt Whitman.  
(Kurt’s always been too scared. Too scared of saying I love you, too scared of losing Sebastian when he went to Paris for a few months, too scared of ever recognizing that he liked Whitman’s poems, too scared that he would choose Sebastian over Paris and it wouldn’t be worth it. Scared of loving too much. But Sebastian proved once and then again and then once more that he will always choose Kurt and Kurt isn’t scared anymore.)  
He gets inked the poem he left in Sebastian’s apartment. It’s for their first anniversary after they get together again, and he doesn’t tell Sebastian before. It’s right between his shoulder blades and hurts and maybe he got a little scared. Not scared of regretting that decision, just scared of the pain. Because choosing Sebastian always ached a little but it’s worth it. It will always be.

“ _Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,_  
missing me one place search another,  
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”


End file.
